Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Has anyone here ever tried Linux From Scratch? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

62 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For those of you who don't know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code.

What was your experience like? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Do you run it as a daily driver or did you just do it for fun?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I did it, learned a lot. But it's not really a system that can be maintained very easily. You don't even have a package manager. :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Back when I did LFS I dealt with this by giving each package an /opt prefix, symlinking their respective bin/, sbin/, lib/, man/ and so on dirs under a common place, and adding those places to the relevant system integrations (PATH, /etc/ld.so.conf etc.)

I put together a bash script that could manage the sumlinks and pack/unpack tarballs, and also wrote metadata file and a configure/make "recipe" to each package dir. It worked surprisingly well.

A handful of packages turned out to be hardcoding system paths so they couldn't be prefixed into /opt (without patching) but most things could.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

You were on your way to reinventing Gentoo

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Do you even have binary packages?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

There's no level of package management, binary or source. There's no practical way to uninstall or upgrade. It's a toy for learning about Linux, which is great, but don't expect it to have anything else.

Edit: I seem to remember some third party package managers, but then you're going beyond the base level documentation. And at a certain point, then you might as well just use a distro. If you want to have a very minimal package manager so you can learn about package managers, sure, it's a learning tool.